A Synopsis of “Islam Di Persimpangan Jalan”

September 23, 2016

Islam at the Crossroads is a book written by Muhammad Asad. The book was originally published in Delhi and Lahore in 1934, and was later reprinted by Dar Al-Andulas in 1982 with an additional note by the author. The book is basically a plea to Muslims to avoid blind imitation of Western social forms and values, and to try to preserve instead their Islamic heritage, which once upon a time had been responsible for the glorious, many-sided historical phenomenon comprised in the term “Muslim civilization”.

The modernization that has bought not only mechanized and hasty mode of living but also a desert to human soul has influence the way of life to the already colonized Muslim; they even became mere consumer of the culture and ideological import from Europe that Asad finds as something that is inhuman, a point that has shaken his heart to embrace the light of Islam.

What appears to be the decay of Islam is in reality nothing but the death and the emptiness in our hearts, which are too idle and too insensitive to hear the eternal voice. In this little book, Asad called for reform in our attitude towards religion, our laziness, our self-conceit, our shortsightedness—in short, our defects, and not some supposed defects of Islam. In order to attain to an Islamic revival, Muslim need not to search for new principles of conduct from outside, but have only to apply the old and forsaken ones.

But, as it happened, much of what the Asad had aimed at was subsequently misunderstood by the readers and leaders who failed to grasp the full implications of his call to cultural creativeness and to return to the true ideology of the Qur’an and the Sunnah—not instead of a mere return to the social or thinking forms evident in the past centuries of Muslim decadence.

Asad dedicates this book to “the Muslim youth of today in hopes that it may be of benefit” and would clarify something of the tragic confusion nowadays prevailing in the Muslim world.